Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter (a New York Times bestseller); and The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln. She has consulted on feature film scripts, documentaries, museum exhibits, public history initiatives, and numerous publications, and appeared on CBS Sunday Morning, the BBC, PBS, C-Span, and NPR.
Larson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, and she reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Kate Clifford Larson's website.“Her signature song was ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ ” Simpson remembered, “but she wanted to do the gospel songs . . . ‘Walk with Me’ . . . we did that one, and it was just so powerful, and that calmed her down . . . And it was like, you know, ‘Walk with me, Lord, please.’ ” At this point in the interview, Simpson started to sing, then broke down in tears. “This is going to make me cry, so I . . . So I’ll stop, Okay . . . Can we stop a minute?” The interviewer, John Dittmer, reassured her, and after Simpson composed herself, she continued her testimony.Does this page give a good sense of the book as a whole? Remarkably, yes! That moment in Hamer’s life, and that song she sang, gave me the title for my book. This chapter describes the arrests and vicious assaults on African American Civil Rights activist and Mississippi sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer and her colleagues by white law enforcement in Winona, Mississippi on June 9, 1963. It was a bright Sunday morning when forty-five-year-old Hamer was arrested at an interstate bus terminal in that city along with teenagers Euvester Simpson and June Johnson, and thirty-two-year-old Annell Ponder, among others. The civil rights workers were returning home to Mississippi after spending two weeks in Charleston, South Carolina learning nonviolent protest techniques and participating in citizenship and voter registration courses. The training programs were sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), both civil rights organizations born out of the struggles for racial equality and justice in the 1950s and 1960s. Hamer’s group had traveled by bus from Greenwood, Mississippi to Charleston and back and were nearly home—a 1,400-mile roundtrip—when they were arrested by state highway patrolmen and local police for trying to integrate the bus terminal restaurant and washrooms. Recently passed federal rulings outlawed segregated seating on interstate buses and in terminals across the country. The new laws infuriated many southern white people, and some were determined to prevent the inevitable: integration.
Singing was one of the only comforts Hamer had, and it soothed her battered body and soul. “Walk with Me” had helped her survive that vicious beating. She did not walk alone, for Jesus was with her. She needed him because she could not walk. Jesus had endured many sufferings and risen triumphantly to lead those who believed. That gospel song reassured her that he was walking with her, giving her courage to go on.
Walk with me, Lord! Walk with me!
Walk with me, Lord! Walk with me!
While I’m on Lord, this pilgrim journey,
I need Jesus, to walk with me.
Be my friend, Lord! Be my friend!
Be my friend, Lord! Be my friend!
While I’m on Lord, this pilgrim journey,
I need You Jesus, to be my friend.
Don’t leave me alone, Lord!
Don’t leave me alone!
Don’t leave me alone! Lord!
Don’t leave me alone, Oh Lord!
While I’m on my pilgrim journey,
Well I need you Jesus, to walk with me.
Well, I need Jesus to walk with me.
Mississippi was one of the most violent places in the country, and the police department in Winona had a reputation for unrestrained violence toward Black prisoners. Hamer and her colleagues survived four days of terror and then released. The brutal beating and sexual assault that Hamer endured left her with life-long injuries. But her trust in God fortified her, sparking a spiritual rebirth. She recommitted herself to fighting injustice and facing down threats and crushing discrimination with a fearlessness rooted in her deep and unwavering faith. She would rise up and take on racism and segregation on a national stage, calling on a divided America to walk with her on a journey toward equality, just as she had asked God to walk with her as she struggled to survive another day in the Winona jail.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
